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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Deep Space: The new frontier of radiation controls
In commercial nuclear power, there has always been a deliberate tension between the regulator and the utility owner. The regulator fundamentally exists to protect the worker, and the utility, to make a profit. It is a win-win balance.
From the U.S. nuclear industry has emerged a brilliantly successful occupational nuclear safety record—largely the result of an ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) process that has driven exposure rates down to what only a decade ago would have been considered unthinkable. In the U.S. nuclear industry, the system has accomplished an excellent, nearly seamless process that succeeds to the benefit of both employee and utility owner.
R. D. M. Garcia, C. E. Siewert, J. R. Thomas Jr.
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 186 | Number 2 | May 2017 | Pages 103-119
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2016.1273627
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The long-standing problem of implementing the PN method effectively for spherical geometry is revisited in this work. It is shown that a least-squares approach to the method resolves to a great extent the numerical instability reported for the first time by Aronson in 1984. In the proposed version of the method, a small loss of accuracy is still observed for intermediate orders of the approximation, but in high order (typically N ≥ 199), full accuracy is recovered, and the method can be used with confidence even for extremely high orders of the approximation. Numerical results of benchmark quality are tabulated for the quantities of interest for two basic transport problems in spherical geometry: the albedo problem for a sphere and the critical-sphere problem, both including cases that show the effects of scattering anisotropy described by the binomial law.